Thursday, November 28, 2013

Still alive....

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...but in no mood to think or write. 4 hours of rehab exercises every day. Happy Thanksgiving to all!
1 comment:
Thursday, November 21, 2013

MindBlog on medical leave.

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I'm heading into knee surgery early tomorrow morning, and may not be feeling in shape to continue doing posts for awhile.
6 comments:

The biology of sacred values.

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Frank Rose does a nice piece in the NYTimes, pointing to the work of Gregory Berns and others, on brain correlates of why financial incen...
Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Your fitness age - a simple online calculator

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Several popular articles have directed attention to recent work by Nes et al. , which suggests that answers to seven simple questions can pr...
Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Making muscle

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Several scientific journals are having a robust and quirky sense of humor these days. I have to pass on this take-off on the Charles Atlas ...
Monday, November 18, 2013

More on long-term benefits of early musical training.

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White-Schwoch et al. show that older adults who took music lessons at an early age - the type of instrument doesn't matter - can proces...
Friday, November 15, 2013

Where musical melodies are represented in our brains.

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Here is a fascinating piece by Schindler et al. (open access) showing that musical melodies, or ‘gestalts’ are encoded at very early stages...
3 comments:
Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Why some of us can, or can't, disengage from pain.

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Kucyi et al.,  note a beneficial effect of mind wandering and increased default mode network activity on pain suppression. Here is the auth...
Tuesday, November 12, 2013

The promises of 'priming'

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I've done numerous posts noting psychological experiments on the phenomenon of priming, whose practical application is a major component...
Monday, November 11, 2013

The serious business of play

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Gillian Brown reviews what looks like a very interesting book from Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin "Play, Playfulness, Creativity and...
Friday, November 08, 2013

Motor exploration of 5-month old predicts academic achievement at 14 years.

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A fascinating part of these observations is the lack of correlation noted in the last sentence of the abstract:. From Bornstein et al .: ...
1 comment:
Thursday, November 07, 2013

The quest for personal enhancement - adding self brain stimulation to the toolkit?

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I done a series of posts on computer games that can enhance attention, intelligence, memory, navigation and at least partially reverse the e...
1 comment:
Tuesday, November 05, 2013

Generating music during exercise lessens sense of physical effort.

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A fascinating bit of work from Fritz et al. makes one wonder whether our human love of music is based in part on its ability to ease physic...
3 comments:
Monday, November 04, 2013

Slaves of the Internet, Unite!

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To continue the rant started in last Tuesday's post , let's move on to emphasizing how, in addition to our digital connections compr...
Friday, November 01, 2013

Sleep cleans our brains, renews our synapses, consolidates our memories

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This bit of work got a flurry of attention recently, but I think is important enough to warrant repeating here.  Xie et al.   have used an e...
1 comment:
Thursday, October 31, 2013

Scary music for Halloween - Dance Macabre

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You should have a look at the 13 scariest pieces of classical music for Halloween, assembled by Limelight Magazine . It is hard for me to s...
Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Finding a protein linking exercise to brain health

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Yet another candidate for a life enhancing drug? ...perhaps a protein that mimics the effect of the protein FNDC5, which is produced by musc...
1 comment:
Tuesday, October 29, 2013

"Only Disconnect" - The pathology of digital of connectivity

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Alas, it seems increasingly clear that to follow E.M. Forster’s dictum “Only Connect” (i.e. with humans in person, what our emotional brain...
Monday, October 28, 2013

Perspective taking can turn competitors unethical

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An interesting bit from Pierce et al. : Perspective taking is often the glue that binds people together. However, we propose that in compet...
Thursday, October 24, 2013

Oxytocin, gentle human touch, and social impression.

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Another bit of information from Leknes and collaborators , expanding on their work mentioned in a recent post : Interpersonal touch is fre...